Promoting strong public schools for Providence\’s East Side and beyond

NY Times on Middle Schools- Part III

The NY Times has published the third in a series of articles on the challenges of teaching Middle Schools. The excerpts below give the gist. The entire article can be read here.

“Faced with increasingly well-documented slumps in learning at a critical age, educators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.”

“As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind……”

“Part of the challenge of middle school is the breathtaking range of student ability, more pronounced than in elementary schools, where one can only fall so far behind, or high schools, which generally offer tracked classes…..”

“The most recent results of math and reading tests given to students in all 50 states showed that between 1999 and 2004, elementary school students made solid gains in reading and math, while middle school students made smaller gains in math and stagnated in reading.”

“Yet many middle school teachers land there by happenstance. “More people end up in middle schools because that’s where the openings are,” said Carmen Fariña, a former deputy chancellor of the New York City school system who is now helping 35 middle school principals reshape their schools. “It’s not necessarily a choice.”

“Just go to a job fair,” [a principal] said. “The lines for elementary school and high school are around the corner. We can’t get people to teach in middle schools.” …..

At I.S. 339, there is very little ability-based tracking, as Mr. Levy feels it leads to a “dumping-ground mentality.”

The downside is evident in one of Matt Tepper’s seventh-grade English classes; one student responded to an assignment to write a memoir with a vivid, smoothly relayed narrative of being in a car accident, while another handed in an ungrammatical account of a dog’s illness.

“I’m writing about one day my dog got sick,” the student wrote. “This a moment that never I going to lost. Because my dog it like my baby okay.”

Questioned after lunch one winter day, students were in agreement: While Ms. Siddiky may be “mad cool,” the job of a middle school teacher is not to be envied.

These difficulties have lead some to suggest abolishing middle schools, usually to replace them with K-8 Those of you who have been following along since summer know that the Superintendent’s committee on Nathan Bishop recommended that Bishop remain a middle school. The problems of educating middle schoolers don’t go away when they are merged with elementary school children, and other problems are created. Still, the article makes it clear that teachers need to be ready to deal with the issues of adolescents.

The comments on tracking are particularly interesting. On the one side, critics worry that lower-performing students will get “dumped” and left further behind. On the other hand, skill differences emerge more prominantly in middle school, and it doesn’t serve anyone well to give the same treatment to students with markedly different needs. We hope that the education plan proposed by the Bishop committee will allow teaching to be well-tailored to students’ skills and needs.